


What will remain of us is love

by straight_up_gay



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: I Love Roasting The Jedi Code, M/M, POV Multiple, Someone talk to me about the relationship between the Jedi and the Guardians, because i bet that shit was FASCINATING, i'm gay as hell and the Force is with me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-28
Updated: 2017-05-28
Packaged: 2018-11-04 21:06:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10998990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straight_up_gay/pseuds/straight_up_gay
Summary: The Jedi Code forbids attachments. Not everyone who believes in the Force agrees.(or, five perspectives on love)





	What will remain of us is love

i)

"Baze? Are you in there?"

Behind the door of the refresher, Baze keeps absolutely still. Maybe, if he's quiet enough, Chirrut will go look for him somewhere else.

Like everything else in the Jedi Temple, the refresher is fancier than the ones they have back home. The shower uses real water, an impossible luxury on Jedha, and the wall opposite the door is entirely mirrored. His reflection stares back from it, sullen and red-eyed.

"How did your day go? I know you were looking forward to the debate."

It’s been a hundred cycles since any of the Guardians of the Whills have left Jedha for a formal theological conference, and longer still since any of them had debated with the Jedi. The fact that the Abbayettra had picked a young acolyte to be part of the cultural exchange was an incredible privilege.

And he'd ruined it.

"Well, if you won't tell me about yours, I'll tell you about mine. They had me with the younger padawans today, so I just taught them first-duan fighting. But they were all so excited to meet me, and they called me Master Îmwe!"

Chirrut has always been good with children, as long as you didn't mind them picking up some of his Jedhan street-gambler's vocabulary. And even the masters who don't like him have to admit that he's the best at zama-shiwo in his year, all grace and terror and holiness in motion.

"Lunch was the best bit. They taught me a song about a Jedi Knight who defeats other Jedi and eats their bones. They actually sang it for twenty minutes until Master Windu ordered them to stop!"

Baze can't help it, he lets out a watery chuckle.

"Hah! I knew you were in here!" Chirrut thumps on the door so hard that it bounces in its frame. "Now let me in, you great big fool."

"No," says Baze, and he hates how his voice sounds, all choked and soft. Only the youngest initiates cry when they get in trouble, and he's almost a full Guardian now.

Chirrut’s knees crack, and Baze realizes that he’s crouching down to be level with him.

"Come on, Bazey! I told the padawans that the other acolyte in our party was the handsomest man on Jedha, and that I had actually gone blind looking at him. They all want to see you to find out if it's true!"

For a moment, he's poisonously jealous of Chirrut's easy grace, his lack of regard for what anyone else thinks of him. The Abbayettra had told him that he and Chirrut didn't need to hide anything, that they were honoured guests and not Jedi padawan. But in the vaulted halls of the Jedi Temple, Baze still finds himself looking over his shoulder before he kisses him.

It's like being in the old kyber cave under Jedha, half a mile of rock hanging over his head.

"I hate Coruscant. I hate the conference. I want to go home."

"Of course," Chirrut says, drily. "You hate the conference. That's why you spent your time in the library with your mouth open so wide you could fly a landspeeder into it. That's why you nearly cried when you got to talk to Master Billaba. That's why you woke me up at a Force-forsaken hour this morning going over your notes. Which I still haven't forgiven you for, by the way."

Baze slumps back against the door in defeat. He has never been good at hiding things, and hiding things from Chirrut is an even more hopeless endeavour. "Is there any chance you'll go away and leave me alone?"

"You know there isn't," Chirrut says, cheerfully. "So you may as well tell me what's going on."

"I was rude to Master Yoda at the debate today."

"Hmm. And what did the venerable Jedi Master do to earn it?"

Chirrut has a talent for making words mean the opposite of their definition. "Venerable" crumbles away to ash in his mouth.

Master Yoda hadn't liked Chirrut very much.

"He said that attachments were selfish and they lead to the Dark Side." There's a slow indrawn breath from the other side of the door, but he keeps going. "He said that people led by their attachments are little better than black holes, always wanting and wanting and giving nothing back out to the Force in return."

He'd known what the Jedi thought about attachments before he came to Coruscant, of course. He'd read the _Jedi Codex_ and Avior Stiepo's _Coruscant Letters_ and Djinn Altis' _Disputations_. But it had been a different thing to hear it with Master Yoda looking at him like he could see into his soul and find his points of weakness.

"I'm sorry," Chirrut says, all the joking drained out of his voice. "What did you say back?"

"I...um. Well. I told him that the only way he could believe that was if he didn't know anything about love, or anything about people."

Chirrut gasps, and Baze can almost feel his eyes widen from the other side of the door. "You _what_?"

"I quoted almost all of the _Nabberian Volume_ at him," Baze continues, voice hollow. Oon Draav was one of the few sentients to ever be forcibly ejected from a Coruscanti theology conference, and he'd written the _Nabberian Volume_ in the aftermath. His words on the Jedi Order were icily polite.

"Even the bit with the bantha?!"

"Yes," he groans. He had forgotten about that. "I think I may have ruined the conference."

There is a long-standing treaty between the Jedi and the Guardians. But Jedha is a small mid-rim planet whose chief export is hairsplitting theological arguments, and Coruscant is a trade hub with the might of the Republic's army behind it. The Jedi may claim that the conference is between equals, but the Guardians can't afford that illusion. They certainly can't afford a young acolyte mouthing off to the head of the Order in front of a packed room.

"And the Abbayettra..." She had said that his grasp of theology was equal to that of Masters much older than him, and he'd shown that he didn't even have a grasp of common sense.

"The Abbayettra will be stern to you, and then forgive you," Chirrut says. "She's always forgiving with those who are sorry and learn something from their mistakes."

“But I’m not sorry,” Baze says, quietly. “And it wasn’t a mistake."

Chirrut is well-known in the Temple for his neverending chatter, but he’s dead silent now.

“I’m sorry I let her down. I’m sorry I embarrassed the Temple. I’m sorry I didn’t have better words, nicer words, to use. But I’m not sorry I did it.”

That's the awful thing, how not-sorry he is. How he'd do it again, over and over if he had to.

"Responsible Baze Malbus," Chirrut says, finally, wonderingly. "The darling of the Temple. That was very brave of you, you know?"

Baze flushes, ducking his face into his hands again. He's never been good at dealing with compliments. "I'm a fool," he says, voice faintly muffled.

"Well, that too, but brave, still. Are you ready to come out yet?"

"Not yet," he admits. It's still obvious that he's been crying, and the thought of the Temple's protocol droids asking him if he's all right is mortifying.

"Well, I'll give you time. But if you're not out of there by dinner, I swear I'll tell Master Billaba that you trapped yourself in there so she'll break down the door."

Baze considers whether Chirrut would actually do that, and decides that he would. "That's fair," he says.

Chirrut runs his fingers down the outside of the door, as though he's running his fingers through Baze's hair. "Love you," he says, quiet and sweet.

"Love you too," Baze says back, and he doesn't care if the whole Temple can hear it. 

ii)

The wind stirs the sand into dust devils and wails around buildings. When he'd first visited Tatooine, Ben Kenobi had dismissed their belief in unquiet spirits, seen it as the result of a place with too much mysticism and too little hope.

Now, watching the wind sweep through Mos Eisley like a living thing, he isn't so certain.

It's been over half an hour since Luke had gone missing, half an hour since he'd slipped away from his uncle's side when he was examining a set of solar cells. Ben knows that he's still alive, that the Force would have told him if he had died, but he doesn't know any more than that.

His uncle knows even less. Owen Lars has no sense of the Force, no reassurance that his nephew is safe. He has been calling for Luke since he disappeared, his voice raw and frantic. Ben would help him, but the last time Owen had seen his face, he'd made it very clear that mad Ben Kenobi wouldn't be ruining the lives of any other Skywalkers.

Besides, there's something about the way he calls Luke's name that makes Ben ache to his core.

Instead, Ben focuses on Luke's Force signature, the thread of bright, soft green running through the marketplace. It's scattered and diffuse, and it leaves dead ends and curious traces. It's the trail of a child — and what's more, a child who doesn't want to be found.

That, at least, means that Luke is exploring and not lost.

The trail takes him back into the colourful center of the market, alive with merchants offering every scam under the sun. To his left, a Tusken struggles with a string of shaggy bantha, which are clearly spooked by the crowds. Ben knows that bantha are bred more for the desert than for cities, and that they are easily frightened when surrounded by people. And once one bantha is afraid, the rest of the herd follows, emotion spreading through them like a quick illness.

As he watches, the one on the end breaks off, to the amusement of the surrounding marketplace. The Tusken swears at the crowd, then goes to chase after the runaway bantha.

In the moment Ben's attention is diverted, Luke's trail disappears. He swears, quietly. He's going to have to ask one of the locals for help.

He walks up to a woman counting coins on her begging mat. "Excuse me," he asks. "Did you see a young boy walk past? About this high, human, probably smiling."

The woman squints at him. "And what's he to you?" she asks.

He has to suppress a sigh. If he had been back on Coruscant, asking for help rounding up his errant padawan, he wouldn't have met this sturdy wall of suspicion.

"He's my brother's son. My nephew."

The woman snorts. "Well, if you want your brother to have a son for much longer, you'll want to catch up to him. He was following a group of bounty hunters. Looked like they were heading toward His Highness' Palace." She spits in the dust, expressing her opinion of the Highness she'd described.

Oh, no. He's going to the Desilijic Complex.

Forgetting the heat, Ben breaks into a run. Jabba the Hutt's townhome is no place for a moonfaced kid who can't seem to keep his mouth shut.

He reaches the wall of the complex, panting and cursing the stiffness in his bad knee. The guard at the wall swivels toward him, and Ben has to waste precious moments telling him that he is not to pay attention. He takes the curve of the wall at a gallop, the durasteel lattice giving him glimpses of the lush garden inside.

When he sees Luke, he stops dead in his tracks. The boy is unharmed, and talking to someone inside the fence. He approaches cautiously, not wanting to disturb whoever he's talking to in case they have a blaster.

Luke tilts his head to the side, obviously concerned. "Do you need water?" He holds up the little leather bottle tied to his hip. "My uncle says I'm not s'posed to give this out to people, but I'm not thirsty."

In Ben's experience with Tattooinians, giving someone water is the highest expression of love and trust, barely any less serious than a marriage proposal. And Luke had just offered it to a complete stranger. Unfortunately, this is not even unusual for Luke, who seems determined to adopt or befriend anyone who isn't actively pointing a blaster at him.

There's a soft laugh from behind the partition. "Don't worry, little one. Water is one thing I don't have to worry about in here." Whoever it is pauses. "But it's very nice of you to ask."

Luke still isn't happy. "My uncle says this isn't a nice town, and it doesn't have nice people. But you're nice. Do you want to come meet him?"

The next laugh is quieter. "Little one, I would love to meet your uncle, if he's anything like you. But I'm not allowed to leave." Walking slowly towards Luke, Ben catches a glimpse of the other side; a young Twi'lek woman wearing a thick gold necklace. His stomach lurches. On any other world, in any other place, the gold might have been a badge of status.

Luke lifts his chin with an indignant expression that Ben knows only too well. "That's not fair," he says, and what possible benchmark could he have for fairness? How could he think, growing up on this forsaken rock, that fairness is anything but what you can grab or steal with your own two hands?

"An – Luke," he says, and doesn't mean it to come out so sharp.

The boy spins to look at him, face written in confusion.

"What have you been doing?"

The twi'lek woman on the other side of the fence looks frightened. "I'm sorry, sir. Your nephew just lost his way and he was talking to me. I meant nothing by it!"

Ben puts up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "I'm not angry, I just..." but by this point, she's already fled.

Luke glares at Ben, hands on his hips. "Why did you have to scare her away? I would've getted her some of my water!"

Ben fights the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. "She said she didn't need it. I'm sure she'll be fine."

"No, she's not fine!" He struggles for words, flapping his hands. "She was … her face was happy but her head was sad!"

For a moment, Ben is filled with irrational anger. You can’t cast your net that wide, he wants to shout. You can’t care that much and stay standing.

Instead, because _a Jedi does not anger_ , he simply says, “You should not be here alone, youngling.”

Luke’s eyes are dull and cold, and then they aren’t. Something springs back into them, a flash of green. “Your head is sad too,” he says, noting it like he might note the weather. “Do you need water? My aunt says you need to drink before you cry or you’ll get dried up like a big bofa fruit in the sun.”

There’s something about Luke’s frank honesty that catches in his chest, and for a moment he worries he actually will weep, with Luke Skywalker as his witness. He has to steady himself.

“If you must worry about someone, Luke, worry about your uncle. At this moment, he’s wandering the markets, worried sick.” He’s proud of his desert-dry voice.

Luke's face falls, shame warring with stubbornness. "How do you know about me?" he asks, scuffing a boot through the sand.

"I was a friend of your ... of your uncle's. I'll be able to get you back to him."

"Fine," Luke says. "But he's gonna kill me for _real_ this time."

Ben remembers the frightened, helpless look on Owen's face and shakes his head. "You might not be able to tell, but he loves you very much. Underneath it all."

"Huh." Luke clearly doesn't think very much of Ben's intuition. "Can you read minds or something?"

For once, Ben is almost certain his smile looks natural, rather than a ghastly parody of what a smile should be.

"Well, actually," he says, spinning out a half-truth as they rattle along back towards the market.

It's such a familiar feeling that he has to remind himself that he is Ben Kenobi and it's Luke Skywalker at his side.

They wind their way through the streets as the suns start to fall, Luke half-asleep and stumbling over his own feet. Owen's trail is faint but insistent, a shade of brown resonating with frantic energy. By the time they find him, he's talking to a Stormtrooper, looking like his face has caved in.

Luke looks up at Ben. With the same caring carelessness he does everything else, he slips a soft hand into Ben’s. This too is familiar.

The wind is picking up now, Tatooine’s ghosts made manifest.

Ben lets his hand drop, trying not to see the hurt on Luke's face. He needs to be far away, suddenly, away from Luke's cool greeness and the way it presses down on his desert-accustomed lungs. "Go on," he says, softly. "Go to your uncle."

Luke only looks back once.

By the time he reaches his uncle, Ben is safely out of sight. He hears Owen's exhausted shout, the frantic edge undimmed by relief. Right after, as Luke had predicted, there's the full-throated reproach, the  _what were you doing_ s and the _wait till your aunt finds out_ s. Maybe Luke can't hear it, maybe even the most exceptionally knowing young boy couldn't, but there's love in that too.

His lungs are still too full. He walks out into the desert, willing himself calm. 

iii)

Darth Vader has broken many rebels. Watching Anakin Skywalker's son bleed out at his feet is no different.

"I am your father," he says, and Skywalker's eyes widen, pain overwritten by a ghostly grief. This is routine. The connection, or the idea of a connection, matters simply because it might convince the young Jedi to join him.

(There is something wrong with his diagnostics check. The blow to his armour must have been harder than he thought, because the hollow place below his respirator aches. He will need to adjust it when he returns to the Emperor's side.)

"No, no. That's not true!" A quick reading of Skywalker's face indicates that he does not believe himself, that he is standing on the edge of the truth and willing himself not to look down. When he screams, Vader catalogs it for useful information; what percentage of despair to defiance, what measure of betrayal, has the shock from the blood loss set in yet. The statistics show up on the side of his helmet, unaffected by the mysterious injury to his chestplate.

(His armour has not been this damaged since his fight with Anakin Skywalker's old apprentice. Perhaps it will require extra reinforcement.)

"Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny!" This is the wrong strategy, he knows it as soon as he's said it. The Skywalker boy is not looking for power or destiny or recognition.

"Join me and together, we can rule the galaxy, as father and son." He puts a special emphasis on the last part, _father and son_ (not his son of course, Anakin Skywalker's son of course). Fool that young Skywalker is, willing to risk everything to save his friends, perhaps he will follow that bright line down.

The Emperor had been right. Trusting a part of yourself to another living being is always, only, a weakness. In this case, it is a weakness he can exploit.

The young man looks down the shaft, willing an escape. Darth Vader, expert in tactical battle planning, knows there is none.

"Come with me," he says. "It is the only way."

He realizes, afterwards, that he had misjudged the source of his malfunction. There is something wrong with his neural processors, not his respiratory supports. Because when the boy falls (escapes), he feels a twitch of something like joy.

At least by the time he needs to report back to the Emperor, the malfunction has stopped. Darth Vader needs nothing else to make him weak.

iv)

When he's scared, Luke takes things apart in his head. He pictures himself back at his workbench, back at home, with Aunt Beru’s tools spread out around him. Sometimes, he can even hear his aunt's voice telling him how to undo this particular kind of spanner, which joints were weak and could pop out easily.

When he was younger, it had been the little toy dewback he slept with, cloth over a mechanical skeleton that he knew down to the grooves in the joints.

Now, he pictures disassembling the elevator he’s in.

The rivets are good quality, but not soldered in well; he could take them apart with just his single spanner. The walls are limebright durasteel, which you can’t dent even with a hacksaw droid, but there are jointing lines running up them. If you took a rad torch to them, you could get through them in no time at all.

"Sloppy work," says Aunt Beru's cool voice, in his head. "Just shows they're cutting corners left and right."

To his side, Darth Vader breathes evenly through his mask, saying nothing.

He wonders how Darth Vader's helmet would be disassembled, how he might take it apart on the old vibrawood table. Maybe there's a panel on the back, something to help take the mask off when it needs maintenance. Or maybe not.

It strikes Luke that he doesn't have any idea what's under the helmet, whether Vader's face is droidlike or warped by the Dark Side or a mirror of his own, older and with harsher lines in it.

This isn't helping. He needs to think about something else.

How to disassemble an x-wing, maybe, a sequence he's gone through many times. _Start at the cockpit, using the smallest c-spanner in his collection to delicately fiddle out the rivets without denting the windows. Next, use a grade-a durasteel crowbar to slide the windows out of their mooring, making sure to lower them to the ground gently and_ –

“Why did you give yourself up?” Darth Vader asks.

It takes Luke a moment to put himself back in the elevator. “Because I believe you can still come back to the Light Side, Father.”

“The other reason.”

Luke buries the thought _because I'm a distraction for my friends_ under layers of control and suppression, weighted down with Yoda's training. But the other things he’s trying not to think about bob back up, out from under the weight of his attention.

How would Luke Skywalker, turned to the Dark Side, take apart the Rebellion?

_Go back to Endor, rot their intelligence channels one by one, smile like he's not a dead thing walking, kill anyone who gets suspicious_ –

He clenches his fists, nails tearing into the soft parts of his palms, but the pain doesn't help. His head feels like an old nightmare of his, where he's in the cockpit of an x-wing with the controls melted clean off.

– _but not before getting into their heads and making them tell him everything they know, forcing it out of them, because if there's one thing Luke Skywalker knows it's how to read people and maybe that will only make him worse when he turns –_

__

He tries to remember what Master Yoda said about how Jedi find their true strength through dispassion and calm, not giving way to anger or fear or attachment. But he hadn't said what to do when the fear was inside of you already, eating away at you like steelrot.

– _and Master Yoda is dead and there would be no one to stop him if he turned, no one..._

“Slow down, little pilot,” Aunt Beru says, and for a moment, Luke almost believes she’s there, that he’s eight years old again and he’s scraped his knee running after a landspeeder. “You can’t get anywhere without fuel in your tank. Breathe."

He slows his breathing like Uncle Owen taught him when he had his attacks, five seconds in and five seconds out and five seconds held.

Five seconds in and five seconds out and five seconds held.

“Good. Now, remember, don’t try to hold the thought down. Let it go through your head and out the other end.”

Luke blinks, and the other Luke is gone, swept out with Beru Whitesun's voice. In better light, it doesn’t look a lot like him.

“I don’t know where you get your delusions from, laserbrain,” says Leia, as unimpressed as she ever was with Han. “You think we couldn’t stop you?” In his head, she rolls her ghostly eyes.

How had he forgotten about Leia? Leia, who is good and kind and who would kill her brother without hesitation if if he turned, love tempered by her molten core into something fierce and just.

He reaches out and Han is there too, voice slung out like an arm around the people he loves. Lando is a shield in the Force, a protector and a shining sun ( _he'd kissed Lando raw and desperate in the wake of Cloud City, and Lando had returned it with a firm gentleness_ ).

And he's flying again, engines back online. The fear is there, but not overwhelming.

He opens his eyes. Darth Vader is still tilted towards him, waiting for a response that hasn't come yet.

In a trance, Luke reaches out for his father the way his aunt had taught him to get close to a wounded animal, slow and steady. The Force around him feels blunted, a scar healed white. But there's pain nonetheless.

“Do not think that your Jedi tricks will sway me,” Darth Vader says, and the gates slam down on his mind.

Maybe it's Luke's imagination, but Vader's voice seems harsher, less certain. He smiles. 

"And do not think that your friends will save you."

Odds are he'll die out here when Lando blows the reactor core, alone. But his friends are here with him in his heart and his lungs and his spine.

"I know they won't," he lies.

v)

In the place beyond death, one of the spirits is wandering.

He isn't quite sure what he is looking for, an echo of something he knew or felt when he was alive. All he knows is that something is missing.

He can feel the Force around him, stronger than it ever was in life. He knows that he would be happy about this, that whoever he used to be would be smiling. But all he has is a head filled with scraps, and the knowledge that something important is missing.

An absence is more than nothing. It’s a nothing that points to something. The spirit keeps walking.

The sand underfoot crunches pleasantly under his bare feet, and the sun is hot on his back. He remembers some faiths say that after you die, you have to walk a desert all on your own. What was at the other end of the desert wasn't clear. All he remembers is the desert and the voice that told him about it, soft and rough and warm.

Well, he is used to deserts. He trudges on, his staff sinking into the sand.

He hums to himself as he walks. The he-who-he-was-when-he-was-alive had liked to sing, he remembers. But whenever he tries to think of the words, the fog in his head comes down again.

The sun's heat slowly drains from the sand, and the spirit knows that it must be night. Nights in the desert, he remembers, get cold. So he wraps his cloak more tightly around him, and keeps walking.

He doesn't know which way he's supposed to be going, but somehow, he isn't worried. He knows he is going in the right direction.

"The Force is with me," he says thoughtlessly, then claps a hand over his mouth at the shock of his own voice. It's clear and bright, not the warm voice he remembers from earlier.

His feet are freezing now, numb from the chilled sand. But his feet have been cold before. He remembers someone wrapping a blanket around his shoulders, someone telling him that he needs to _stop giving all your warm clothes away or you will die of exposure, you old fool._

His mouth twitches up into a smile.

It’s difficult to walk with his feet so numb, and he sits down for a moment to get some relief.

He rips off the hem of the cloak and winds it around one of his feet, remembers doing this before. The warm voice sings through the memory, saying, _listen, if you wrap your hands like this before you fight, it will hurt less_. His own voice, younger and sharp-edged, asks _why are you helping me?_ And the other voice responds, _well, isn't that what Guardians are supposed to do?_

There’s a weight to that memory, something more real than the desert or the cold or even the polished weight of his staff in his hand. He’d give the cloak off his back to know the rest of it.

With his feet wrapped in cloth, the cold isn’t as painful. He can keep walking.

And there is something pulling him forward now, something more than just a vague feeling in the Force. Something to do with the voice, the one that had told him about the desert.

_Let me see you, he asks. And his hands are mapping out someone else's face, soft under his fingertips and trembling slightly_. His hands twitch, remembering how that face had felt, like it was the beginning and the end of the universe.

He keeps walking, switches direction because it feels right, still humming to himself. Time doesn't feel real here. Perhaps he has been walking for a hundred years, perhaps it's only been ten minutes. Perhaps both.

He stumbles over a rock and pain shoots through his left side. _Someone is calling his name, voice jagged against itself like broken kyber. Someone is holding him_ and he bites his lip bloody, trying not to fall to the sand. _Everything else is crowded out but the pain and the hands on him and the voice._

This is a test. Or if not, it's close enough to a test that he doesn't want to fail. He stays standing.

When the pain passes, he gasps out a breath, licking blood off his teeth. The desert is even more silent than before.

And the voice calls out for him again, this time indisputably real.

You had to walk the desert on your own, he remembers. But clearly, whoever the voice belongs to doesn't care. Without knowing quite why he does it, he breaks into a run, sand spraying out under his feet.

The voice is closer now, and it echoes familiar. "Chirrut," it shouts, raw and loud and bright. "Chirrut, I'm here!"

And the rest of his memories break open over him.

_In the time before the Temple falls, a Jedi Master asks Chirrut Îmwe what would happen if he had to choose between love and the Force. And because he's been told to be polite, he doesn't laugh at the ridiculous question. Love and the Force are woven through each other, in and around and over and under, and you can't separate the threads without tearing the whole blanket. He doesn't even know why you'd want to try._

"Baze," he yells back, and his voice fills the Force, fills up the whole sky.

**Author's Note:**

> I have a lot of feelings about the redemptive power of love in the Star Wars universe, a lot of feelings about the power of love and empathy in general, and a set of 95 theses about Why The Jedi Were Wrong that I'm prepared to nail to Yoda's door at any given moment.
> 
> ANYWAYS this is a Certified Mess but I had a wonderful time writing it.


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